Archive for the ‘language’ Category

Motherboard TV : Jason Silva

.:motherboard.tv->

Did Americans in 1776 have British Accents?

I’d always assumed that Americans used to have British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same.

Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.

What’s surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then. (Source)

Nancy Duarte on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Speech

Politics and the English Language

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Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

: Continue reading the article by George Orwell :

North American English Dialects Map

: Click to enlarge :

China Bans Use of English in Print, Internet

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Chinese authorities have banned the use of foreign words and phrases - especially English - in Chinese newspapers, books and websites.

The ban, reported Wednesday, was issued by the General Administration of Press and Publication, the governing body for written publications. It says the increasing use of English and half-English phrases is damaging the purity of the Chinese language and disrupting the nation’s "harmonious and healthy cultural environment."

The ruling body leaves some room for English words and abbreviations to be used if they are immediately followed by a Chinese translation or explanation. It says translations should be consistent with basic translation principles and practices.

.:voanews.com->

Speak Ruby in Japanese

: Continue on to the dictionary :

The Foolishness of "Natural Language Programming"

Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even if a moment’s thought would have revealed that those instructions contained an obvious mistake. "But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process." (A.E.Houseman). They eagerly hoped and waited for more sensible machinery that would refuse the embark on such nonsensical activities as a trivial clerical error evoked at the time.

Machine code, with its absence of almost any form of redundancy, was soon identified as a needlessly risky interface between man and machine. Partly in response to this recognition so-called "high-level programming languages" were developed, and, as time went by, we learned to a certain extent how to enhance the protection against silly mistakes. It was a significant improvement that now many a silly mistake did result in an error message instead of in an erroneous answer. (And even this improvement wasn’t universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn’t ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.) The (abstract) machine corresponding to a programming language remained, however, a faithful slave, i.e. the nonsensible automaton perfectly capable of carrying out nonsensical instructions. Programming remained the use of a formal symbolism and, as such, continued to require the care and accuracy required before.

In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt.

.:cs.utexas.edu->

atomo : The Programmer’s Programmable Programming Language

atomo is a small, simple, insanely flexible and expressive programming language. its design is inspired by Scheme (small, simple core), Slate (multiple dispatch, keywords), Ruby (very DSL-friendly), and Erlang (message-passing concurrency). it is written in and piggybacks on the Haskell runtime, permitting access to all of its power (and libraries!) through a thin layer.

.:atomo-lang.org->